Obama downplays Vatican Obamacare talk

ROME — President Barack Obama was pressed on the Catholic Church’s concerns over certain provisions in his signature Affordable Care Act during his Thursday visit to Vatican, though he said his conversations there focused on economic opportunity and global conflicts.

“We actually didn’t talk a whole lot about social schisms in my conversations with His Holiness. In fact, that really was not a topic of conversation,” the president said of his first meeting with Pope Francis during a press conference at Villa Madama, a High Renaissance building just outside the center of the city.

The president’s health care law had loomed over his first face-to-face encounter with the pope, which Obama hoped would be a moment to bask in the religious leader’s popularity and to discuss ways to expand economic opportunity — not to discuss the contentious issue of requiring employers to pay for birth control.

In his meeting with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, there was conversation about “the issue of making sure that conscience and religious freedom was observed in the context of applying the law,” the president said.

Obama added he told Parolin that his administration has worked to make it possible for Americans — particularly women — to be “able to enjoy the kind of coverage that the ACA offers, but that religious freedom is still observed.”

The Catholic Church has made clear its views on contraceptives and other hot-button social issues, Obama said, but that was not something on which his conversations at the Holy See dwelled. “Some of them I differ with. Most I heartily agree with,” he said.

Obama described two main topics of conversation during his meeting with the pope — “the poor, the marginalized, those without opportunity and growing inequality” and conflicts around the world, especially in the Middle East and Latin America. The common theme throughout their discussion was “a belief that that in politics and in life the quality of empathy — the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes and to care for them even if they don’t look like you, talk like you… — that’s critical,” he said.

Opportunity and inequality is “an area that’s going to be of increasing concern” in the United States and around the world, Obama said, and he sees the pope as “hopefully creating an environment in which those of us who care about this are able to talk about it more effectively.” The pope has the “capacity to open peoples’ eyes and make sure that they’re seeing that this is an issue,” while it’s Obama’s responsibility as a politician to try to “come up up with policies to address” issues related to poverty and opportunity, he said.

Though the president stressed the conversation of economic inequality — which fits well with his domestic agenda — there was no mention of it in the Vatican’s readout of the meetings, which said there “was a discussion on questions of particular relevance for the church in that country, such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection.”

There was also talk of immigration reform, with Obama conveying to Francis that he “felt that there was still an opportunity to make this right and get a law passed.”

“As someone who came from Latin America, I think he was very mindful of the plight of many immigrants, who are wonderful people” who work hard but who “still live in the shadows,” Obama said of the pope’s views.

Joined by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in an ornately decorated marble-walled hall here for the press conference, Obama also weighed in on the International Monetary Fund’s pledge of as much $18 billion in loans for Ukraine. It’s a “major step forward,” the president said, as he repeated his call for Congress to take action to provide additional economic aid to Ukraine.

Budoff Brown reported from Rome and Epstein reported from Arlington,Va.